Quotes of the day

AllahpunditPosted at 10:41 pm on October 31, 2013

As Mrs Clinton talked politics, she was asked directly by one of the guests if she had decided to run for the presidency. She smiled and gave what was described as a neutral answer. The guest persisted. Again, Mrs Clinton politely gave a neutral answer. When pressed a third time, the ex-Secretary of State replied: “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

This was humorously described as an unsatisfactory answer, to which Mrs Clinton replied: “Yes, it is unsatisfactory,” and then added: “I’m minded to do it.” Eyebrows rose, but the conversation moved swiftly on. Recently, one US commentator quipped that the former First Lady “is running; she just doesn’t know it yet”.

“All of the Senate Democratic women have written her a letter encouraging her to run,” Hagan told a gathering organized by EMILY’s List, according to Capital New York. The event was part of the group’s “Madam President” series, which is organizing events around the country to promote interest in a female Democratic presidential candidate…

It would also appear to take some of the biggest potential Clinton rivals out of the 2016 mix. Warren, D-Mass., has been widely mentioned as a possible liberal alternative to Clinton in Democratic primaries. While she has denied interest in running, this letter goes further than she’s gone previously in supporting a Clinton candidacy.

Other potential presidential candidates, such as Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., are Clinton supporters who are widely assumed to be ready to forego bids of their own if Clinton runs. This letter would seem to confirm the sense that other Democratic women – and perhaps all other major Democrats – would get out of the way of a Clinton candidacy.

The idea of replacing Mr. Biden with Mrs. Clinton had long been rumored, but the journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, in their new book, “Double Down,” provide a detailed description of the effort inside the senior circle of Obama advisers. It was pushed by the chief of staff at the time, William M. Daley, despite the close personal rapport Mr. Daley had developed with Mr. Biden, a fellow Irish Catholic and veteran of Washington politics.

“When the research came back near the end of the year, it suggested that adding Clinton to the ticket wouldn’t materially improve Obama’s odds,” the authors write in their sequel to “Game Change,” which chronicled the 2008 campaign. “Biden had dodged a bullet he never saw coming — and never would know anything about, if the Obamans could keep a secret.”

“George Soros is delighted to join more than one million Americans in supporting Ready for Hillary,” Vachon said. “His support for Ready for Hillary is an extension of his long held belief in the power of grassroots organizing.”

Soros, a longtime Democratic donor to help grass-roots efforts within the party, has been one of the Democrats’ biggest rainmakers over the past decade.

3. Selfless ambition. Clinton has never been one to run from the clichés of American electoral politics, and while stumping for Virginia gubernatorial candidate and former campaign co-chair Terry McAuliffe, she fully embraced the classic archetype of the do-good political martyr, willing to selflessly give of herself. “When you think about why people run for office in these times — if it’s only about yourself, if it’s only about you wanting to get a job and the perks that go with it, and having people stand up when you come into the room, that’s not enough anymore because it’s hard,” she told the crowd. “Politics is hard.”

4. The Washington outsider. No one can run for national office these days without running against the seat of national political power, even when a member of her own party occupies the White House. At the same McAuliffe rally, she hit on this point as well. “Recently in Washington, unfortunately, we have seen examples of the wrong kind of leadership, when politicians choose scorched earth instead of common ground,” she added. “When they operate in what I call the ‘evidence-free zone,’ with ideology trumping everything else.”…

6. International experience. Her speeches are often colored by anecdotes from her four years of travels on behalf of the Obama Administration. At Chatham House she told of a phone call between Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng after Clinton and other U.S. officials helped him leave China with his family. “He called me from the van on the way to the hospital and said, ‘If I were there, I would kiss you,’” Clinton recalled.

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The GOP’s been tumbling alongside the president. Its favorable rating is at a new low, 22/53; Democrats are down to an acceptable 37/40. But the Democrats’ long-term survival plan involves the coronation of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and her easy defeat of whatever goober the Republicans put up. That’s looking (yes, yes, in October 2013) less preordained. Clinton’s approval is down to 46 percent favorable, 33 percent unfavorable. That’s the lowest number she’s scored since she became secretary of state; she left the office this year with a 56/25 rating.

Obama’s swoon is easy enough to explain. Forty percent of voters say that the Obamacare rollout has made them less confident in the law, and 31 percent doubt the problems can be fixed. Those are actually lower than the overall disapproval numbers for the law, but they’re a reaction to something Obama is actually doing. Clinton’s only just emerged to make some speeches and do one interview with New York magazine, and yet there’s been a net 18-point swing against her in a year.

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How can someone who has spent a life in politics and who sees a clear path to becoming president not run? Mrs. Clinton started her career four decades ago, working with the House Judiciary Committee staff during Watergate. She served as first lady in Arkansas, as an active and highly visible first lady in Washington, as a U.S. senator and as secretary of state. She may have the most diverse political experience of any nominee for president in the last 20 years.

How can a feminist icon not run when she has a solid chance to become the first female president of the United States? Mrs. Clinton surely knows how close she came in 2008. Had she won the Democratic nomination, she would have almost certainly ridden a feminist wave to a victory over John McCain, and she’d likely be in her second term now. She recognizes the election of a female president would mean something for future generations…

To win the general election, she should hope the Republicans nominate a candidate as uninspiring as Mr. McCain. Demographics will play a role. Will the Republicans have a woman on the ticket, or an African-American? Would a Republican nominee like Sen. Ted Cruz or Sen. Marco Rubio pull Hispanic voters from Mrs. Clinton’s column? Or would Mr. Cruz or Mr. Rubio suffer because of their inexperience in a nation still smarting from promoting a first-term senator to the White House in 2008? What would a female, Hispanic governor on the Republican ticket, such as New Mexico’s Susana Martinez, mean to the race?